[Digikam-users] Syncing Digikam collections and databases between different computers

[Andrew Goodbody]

Please look at the bug here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261277 
It contains information about updating the albumroot entry and you can 
even have multiple values for accessing the same files from different 
systems, in comment #13. Unfortunately there is still no GUI frontend to 
edit this in a user friendly manner.

Still however I think a better solution would be to have the albumroot 
information stored in the digikamrc file and only have the relative 
paths in the database.

Andrew

On 01/12/14 20:25, Mick Sulley wrote:
> Yes agreed!  I think it should be possible to arrange a SQLite script to
> auto run to change the UUID back to what it expects, but I have not
> tried it.  I cannot really see why the UUID is in that record at all,
> the path is there and that should be sufficient I would have thought.
>
> If you do come up with a way to automatically sort it out please share.
>
> Mick
>
>
> On 01/12/14 20:07, Jonathan Ballet wrote:
>> Hi Mick,
>>
>> thanks for your reply!
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 06:54:10PM +0000, Mick Sulley wrote:
>>> Hi Jonathan,
>>>
>>> Yes I raised this when I started using DigiKam, as far as I know
>>> there is no
>>> proper fix.  If you just accept at the message it works OK, just takes a
>>> little time.  It is also possible to add a database script to fix it,
>>> here
>>> is an answer that I received to that question back in 2013.  I never got
>>> around to creating the script, I just accept when asked.
>> I would be OK just to accept this, but my laptop is not *that* powerful
>> and it takes ages just to rescan all the images, even if nothing
>> changes.
>>
>> I'm going to try such a script, as you mentioned, although it's going
>> to be, at best, impracticable.
>>
>> I actually wonder what is the purpose of this UUID. If I choose to store
>> the content of Digikam's database into MySQL, is this also stored? I
>> supposed that using a remote database server was to allow sharing
>> between several computers, but if it's stored, that more or less defeats
>> the purpose of having a remote database, isn't it? And if this UUID is
>> not stored, then I wonder what it is using SQLite?
>>
>> Hum, I guess I'll need to have a look...
>>
>>   Jonathan
>>
>>
>>> On Wed, 20 Feb 2013, Mick Sulley wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> When I sync my album between laptop and desktop I get a message when I
>>>> open it on the destination machine saying that the collection is
>>>> available
>>>> but the identifier has changed.
>>>>
>>>> I have looked in the database on each machine and it seems that the
>>>> problem is that the AlbumRoots table is slightly different, the
>>>> identifier
>>>> field is different -
>>>> desktop = "volumeid:?uuid=bf835257-ad63-4580-9692-9d2600740cd1"
>>>> laptop = "volumeid:?uuid=2a6a238c-c404-46b6-886f-873683917b9c"
>>>>
>>>> It does seem to be OK if I just accept the message and continue, but is
>>>> there any way to stop it happening?  Is it likely to cause any
>>>> problems?
>>> Hi Mick,
>>>
>>> Well, this is an old issue, often discussed on this list.
>>> Identifying disk devices by UUID, instead of mount pathname as it should
>>> be - at least on Unix platforms - makes the database hardware dependant.
>>>
>>> Same problem occurs if you manage your collections on USB drives,
>>> even on
>>> the same machine. Changing a drive by a backup drive, or replacing an
>>> old
>>> drive by a new one with a mirror copy of collections will also change
>>> the
>>> physical device UUID.
>>>
>>> The (dirty) fix to work around sync problems is to use small scripts to
>>> make the transfert, e.g. using rsync, then update the database from
>>> SQL command line tool and issue things like that :
>>> UPDATE albumroots SET identifier = 'volumeid:?uuid= new UUID'
>>>   WHERE identifier = 'volumeid:?uuid = old UUID';
>>>
>>> Jean-François
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> Digikam-users at kde.org
>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users
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